Reading Programs Bear Similarities Across the States

Researchers and policymakers may be continuing to debate solutions
to the nation's reading woes, but many struggling schools appear to
have reached a consensus on the subject, even if not by choice.

As President Bush's flagship reading initiative hits full stride, it
is yielding a more uniform approach to teaching the essential skill to
children deemed at risk of failing the subject. Those schools receiving
their share of the $900 million Reading First measure have turned to
many of the same core reading programs, assessments,
professional-development materials, and consultants—a situation
some prominent scholars lament.

"There are similarities from coast to coast," said Richard A.
Allington, the author of Big Brother and the National Reading
Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence. "This is an amazing
one-size-fits-all approach."

When they began rolling out the much-touted reading plan under the
No Child Left Behind Act, federal education officials assured states
they would be given latitude in determining the best way to transform
reading instruction in their schools, provided they took an approach
grounded in scientific research. Now that all the state grants have
been approved, and some 2,000 schools have received funding, there
appear to be close connections in the way many districts and schools
are implementing the program.

In fact, schools from Atlanta to Seattle are applying their Reading
First grants to take remarkably similar approaches to the subject,
according to recent interviews with state Reading First coordinators
and descriptions of the state plans available on the Internet.

"More and more districts are doing the right thing as narrowly
defined," said Susan B. Neuman, a University of Michigan researcher. As
the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education in the
Bush administration until a year ago, she oversaw the Reading First
program. "It's like playing 'telephone,' where we hear one state's
doing this, so we'll do it too. ... When I saw one local proposal, it
was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various others."

Copycats

The local grantees appear to be copying strategies, in part because
many may have had or at least perceived few options in choosing
curricula, teacher-training programs, or assessments.

The law's strict requirements, confusion over how to meet them, and
pressure to appease federal reviewers after they sent the applications
back to states for numerous revisions compelled many of their
grant-proposal writers to be more prescriptive, according to Charlotte
Postelwaite, the chief education policy analyst for the Council of
State Governments, located in Lexington, Ky.

Some states reasoned that they could speed the grant process by
simply following the lead of others that had gained early approval of
their Reading First plans. Still other states gave up their original
designs to meet the September 2003 deadline for getting applications
approved. Instead, they went with the assessments and
professional-development plans they believed would be viewed more
favorably on their applications, said Ms. Postelwaite, who sent
extensive questionnaires to state Reading First directors last
year.

Most states, though, did not initially see the need to specify which
commercial reading programs would be accepted, particularly after
federal officials refuted criticism that there was a preferred "list."
But nearly all states outlined in their plans that local grant
recipients would use the same framework—"A Consumer's Guide to
Evaluating a Core Reading Program," produced by researchers at the
University of Oregon—for evaluating whether a commercial product
has the research base required under the federal law. Only a few brand-
name products can meet the criteria outlined in the guide, some
observers say.

Moreover, to reduce the burden on district personnel, some states
have carried out their own reviews of reading programs on the market
using the guide, and issued preferred or required lists for grantees to
choose from. In some cases, states collaborated on such reviews, as did
Alabama, Idaho, Montana, and Washington, for instance. Several states,
including Alaska, have simply borrowed the analyses conducted by those
further along in the process.

In most states, districts are permitted to stray from the list if
they can show evidence that their own approaches are effective, though
those plans are less likely to gain approval, state officials say.

Lastly, many states have turned to the same corps of experts for
professional development and technical assistance—some of them
the same consultants to the U.S. Department of Education who helped
develop Reading First. Those same consultants—including Edward
Kameenui and other researchers at the University of Oregon, and
SoprisWest consultant Louisa Moats—also led the reading
"academies" that served as a primer for state education officials on
what the law required.

Several state directors said they tapped those advisers because of
their deep understanding of the research and reputations for
implementing effective practices. Others, however, acknowledged that
they felt compelled to hire those who had been recognized by federal
officials as experts.

"We did feel that there was a very select number of
professional-development providers we had an option to work with," said
Faith Stevens, Michigan's Reading First director.

After three unsuccessful attempts at winning grant money under the
previous federal initiative, the Reading Excellence Act, Michigan
officials decided to dictate their approach to Reading First. The state
requires districts that receive the federal grants to choose from an
approved list of commercial reading programs.

That list is limited to five core reading programs: Houghton
Mifflin, Harcourt, Open Court, Macmillan/McGraw- Hill, and Scott
Foresman. Many of the same titles have been identified by other states
as meeting Reading First's criteria for "research based" materials and
instruction.

For many supporters of Reading First and those who have pushed for a
more standardized, explicit, and systematic approach to teaching
reading to students at risk of reading failure, the changes are welcome
relief from the hodgepodge of methods and materials they say have
characterized instruction for more than a decade.

"One of the things you can't miss when you look at these schools is
that many of them are the worst prepared to do anything with respect to
school reform," said G. Michael Pressley, a professor of psychology at
the University of Notre Dame who has been an author for McGraw-Hill's
Open Court Reading series. "For the weakest schools, it's not a bad
thing for them to get a good program and learn how to teach
it."

Standing Firm

Some school leaders are not convinced that the research prescribes
such limited choices. In Massachusetts, Michigan, and Virginia, for
instance, a number of districts eligible for the federal
money—which is targeted to the schools with the lowest
performance in the subject and/or the largest proportions of needy
students—have chosen not even to apply, citing their
unwillingness to adopt prescribed texts or abandon their current
literacy initiatives.

Other districts that felt confident that more holistic literacy
initiatives would meet the federal requirements have met considerable
resistance in many states. After months of defending a more progressive
citywide literacy curriculum, for example, New York City officials did
an about-face last month and promised to require a more structured
program for Reading First schools. ("N.Y.C. Shifts Reading Plan in
49 Needy Schools," Jan. 14, 2004.)

Boston educators have so far been less willing to budge from the
literacy plan they adopted four years ago. It incorporates children's
literature and writing workshops, in addition to basic- skills
instruction and group-reading activities. Officials there were
surprised, though, when the district's request for its share of the
state's $15 million Reading First grant was rejected last year.

"What we were trying to do was meet the state's requirement without
jettisoning our work of the last four or five years," said
Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant. "We thought we had found a middle
ground where we would strengthen our phonics program and address some
of the other areas of a balanced literacy program, but we were going to
stop short of adopting a whole new program from the state list."

The Boston district is again working with state officials to tweak
its proposal, but Mr. Payzant said he would not abandon the district's
current effort, which he says has been yielding higher test scores in
several struggling schools.

Mistaking Rigor?

Critics have pointed to the experiences of Boston and New York City
as examples of how the No Child Left Behind law has unfairly limited
the choices of local decisionmakers.

"If you have a school system that feels the need for [a] scripted
program, then let them get the money for it," said Gerald Coles, an
educational psychologist and author who has been a prominent critic of
the federal law. "But for other school systems that feel [another
approach] is in order, there should be a pro- choice policy. Reading
First is substituting as a magic bullet a single instructional
approach."

Federal officials continue to deny the program is inflexible.

"Taking the nation as a whole, those [criticisms] are in the
minority," said Christopher Doherty, the director of Reading First for
the Department of Education. "Rigorous is not the same as inflexible,
... and I am absolutely unapologetic in acknowledging that Reading
First is rigorous."

For state directors, many of whom say they are optimistic the
changes will lead to positive results, there is little time for such
debates. They are caught in the scramble to implement the program,
which requires recipients to show improvement in students' test scores
within two years or risk losing the money.

In states that were approved late last year, that has meant
reviewing local applications and organizing professional-development
workshops.

In Alabama and Michigan, where local recipients have had a full
school year to employ their new programs, state and federal
representatives are traveling to schools to review testing data and
monitor how well they are sticking to the program's tenets.

Both those states have gotten the word out that they will be tough
on grant recipients that do not meet the challenge. In Michigan, for
example, two schools have already lost their funding, according to Ms.
Stevens, the state Reading First director.

Months after the texts were received, "one school still had the
comprehensive reading program boxed in the front office," she said. "In
the other, the literacy coach was also the acting principal. They were
clearly not ready."

Learn more about the federal Reading First
program, established by the No Child Left Behind Act. According to the
Education Department, the reading program is "a new, high-quality
evidence-based program. ..." The department also posts a fact
sheet and other resources on reading.

MiddleWeb introduces "The Reading Wars," a
collection of research and resources, by stating "In the battle over
how we teach reading in America's schools, politics and pedagogy
struggle for the high ground."

"Learning to Read and the ‘W Principle,'" a Summer 2003
article from Rethinking
Schools, is critical of the Bush administration's Reading First
program, claiming that "The Reading First fiction has been driven by
political ideology and design that has excluded all viewpoints that are
not cheerleading this instruction."

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